I just saw a video on the Net. I want to think it is total nonsense. The video is about a treaty on global warming that President Obama is said to be planning to sign. This treaty is said to throw away America's sovereignty as a nation. That is so outrageous it cannot possibly be true. But, the video is very serious. What's going on here? Is this somebody's idea of a joke? If it is, it is not very funny. Check out the video and share your thoughts.

I don't know if I should commend you for finally waking up to the reality that authentic nihilists and charlatans have been trying to frighten people for thirty years into giving up their personal freedom and national sovereignty with global warming buncomb, . . . . or if I should yell at you for being such a mindless sleepwalker for thirty years and not realizing the global mega-criminals have been laying the groundwork for this for decades.

If you want to get an insight into how far the global warming crime syndicate has penetrated into our society and institutions, just take a look at these websites:

Bon Appetit Management company runs the cafeterias of 500 institutions (mostly colleges). At my daughter's college, the have an explicit policy of serving beef only once every two weeks to reduce the "carbon footprint" of their meals.

They are making college kids feel guilty for EATING!

Talk about covert indoctrination.

Now that you're awake, STAY AWAKE, and give your local global warming b*stards hell at every opportunity.

Is that video in my initial post the real deal or is it a charlatan approach to needlessly scare a lot of people? I do not know what the truth is here. How can I make an intelligent decision if I do not know what the truth is? For all I know there is no such summit let alone a treaty. And, if there is a treaty, how do I know it actually says what the guy on the video say it means? How can I confirm any of this? I am asking for your guidance here.

And, yes, they will be proposing an international treaty no doubt with all kinds of obnoxious provisions beloved by international globalists. And anything that sticks a thumb in the eye of the Great Satan America and the capitalist system will undoubtedly be baked into the treaty.

Lord Monckton, the spokesman on the video, was an aide to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He has been an extraordinarily well-informed and articulate spokesman for those skeptical of "global warming".

Recall that the Kyoto Treaty on climate change was adopted in 1997, and signed by President Clinton, but it was never ratified by the U.S. Senate. Therefore, it was not binding on the U.S. Most of the pain imposed by the Kyoto Treaty was targeted at "developed" countries like the U.S., and most of the other countries in the world were just free-loaders.

Although the people behind Obama are extremist global warming crackpots, and one of the big items on their agenda is so-called "cap and trade", it appears that there is so much popular disgust and revulsion among for this global warming Marxism, that "cap and trade" probably won't be passed by the current congress, even though it is dominated by liberal Democrats.

Obama has recently made noises to the effect that a treaty won't be on the agenda in Copenhagen. I'm not sure what this means, but it may be a recognition on his part that the proposed treaty is such a huge pile of stinking crap that the American public would never accept it.

Still, the U.N. globalists and the environmental Marxists who infest the Obama administration need to be watched and exposed every second because there is not a shadow of a doubt that they are up to no damn good.

I am not sure what an "environmental Marxist" political philosophy would be.

Living in a rural area with few restrictions, I do have an understanding of how the actions of one can impact others outside of the economic and political issues. When my neighbor burns his trash, I am well aware of the fact. When another neighbor allows his side of our shared pond erode, my side goes dry as well. If I fail to control the manure my horses generate, all my neighbors get the "benefits" of the associated flies.

I have found the ethic of reciprocity of more value than contracts, rules, restrictions, or treaties. Fundamental values remain regardless of "law", and "law" too often becomes either an excuse for meeting minimums rather than values, or a justification for conflict.

Just an aside comment by AbbéBoulah’s Southern Cuz on the quality of the argumentation offered here -- which can be done without passing final judgment on the merit of the issue itself yet.

Whatever is going to be proposed in Copenhagen is “said to throw away America's sovereignty as a nation”; proposed by “authentic nihilists and charlatans (who) have been trying to frighten people for thirty years into giving up their personal freedom and national sovereignty with global warming buncomb...”, AKA “global warming crime syndicate”, “local global warming b*stards”; it is “an international treaty no doubt with all kinds of obnoxious provisions beloved by international globalists. And anything that sticks a thumb in the eye of the Great Satan America and the capitalist system will undoubtedly be baked into the treaty”; “people behind Obama are extremist global warming crackpots”; “global warming Marxism”; “huge pile of stinking crap”;

I've been reluctant to get into this silly debate. For your future and mine NOTHING is more important than to understand that your nation state, the economy that gives you a living, the community in which you live are PART, of a global environment. If you have destroyed the environment, in the sort term it's impossible to "buy a new one". In the meantime you have economic decline and mass depopulation. It will seem to happen in a flash once a tipping point is reached.

In my view that tipping point is already past. Politically we are completely unable to get our house in order. We are suffering and we will suffer the consequences of that. I used to think this would be the fate of my grand children. But I see now that I too will live to see this man made disaster.

Lamar, you know damn well that Lord Christopher Monckton, is a scientific charlatan. A victim of his narrow upbringing.

Thomas, since Kyoto it's been the USA in particular taking a free ride. Not that it matters. We'll have water wars and oil wars to speed up the end-game. Human stupidity knows no bounds.

Thomas, you've offered one thing of value to the debate. I appreciated knowing that the Bon Appetit Management company has a policy on healthy food and that they have a wide understanding about what the term "healthy" might mean.

Thomas and Lamar. If you are determined to remain uninformed about the climate debate that's your choice. You could on the other hand go to Google and enter the search terms "Copenhagen climate summit" and get something useful. Note that your "friend" Monckton doesn't rate a mention, nor does he deserve one.

The Copenhagen Climate Council http://www.copenhagenclimatecouncil.com/The Copenhagen Climate Council is a global collaboration between business and science founded by the leading independent think tank in Scandinavia

> I am not sure what an "environmental Marxist" political philosophy would be.

It's a philosophy of governance which says that you and your neighbors are undoubtedly so irresponsible that you and your neighbors cannot be allowed to own the "means of production". The government will manage the land for you because it is smarter, and you will work for them.

> I have found the ethic of reciprocity of more value than contracts, rules, restrictions, or treaties. Fundamental values remain regardless of "law", and "law" too often becomes either an excuse for meeting minimums rather than values, or a justification for conflict.

Nothing left to do but stick our heads in plastic bags before we are drowned by the rising sea levels, starved by the destruction of coral reefs and the entire food chain, or toasted like Venusians by a smothering blanket of CO2.

" . . . Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in."

A moment of truth, if you please. I had never heard of this Lord Christopher Monckton until a friend of mine posted on Tweeter with a link to a video with the guy talking. I could not believe what I was hearing. I hear this guy say the President of the United States is scheduled to sign a global warming treaty to sign away America's sovereignty and help form a one world government. I do a little research on Google and what do I discover? Yes, this treaty is not simply about doing something about the environment. It's also about governing the world. Meanwhile, I see that there is another movie out that debunks all the nonsense of Al Gore's movie about global warming. Both movie's cannot have it right. Somebody's right and somebody's wrong. There no middle ground here for compromise.

If President Obama really does plan to go to Copenhagen and sign a treaty putting an end to America's sovereignty and helping to establish a one world government, it's time for the American people to rise up and put a stop to that kind of insanity. If it means impeaching President Obama, then so be it. America has long said about itself in its national anthem that it is "the land of the free and the home of the brave." Well, in President Obama signs that treaty you can kiss "land of the free and home of the brave" good-bye.

The USA the UK, Russia, France, Germany, and China have worked very hard to be the powerful five, and to discredit the United Nations and to make is powerless and useless, unless it has Security Council backing.

I have no idea where you get the idea of world government from, or what you mean by it. Certainly, nothing planned for Copenhagen has that intention.

On the other hand, the world DOES face a very serious problem, and unless EVERY powerful nation agrees to be part of the solution, no solution will be attempted.

Given the history of the USA to make deals and back out of them later, it's not surprising that the nations once burnt by Kyoto, are not so trusting now,

If you can't get your head around what's happening to the glaciers of the world and to the ice caps. If you don't understand the threat to California's water supply.

If you have not looked at a recent photo of the dead sea and seen the destruction of the shoreline. If you don't know about the rivers that no longer flow to the sea except in flood. I could go on.

What we in the west call GROWTH, is the primary cause of all this destruction.

Our politicians (here in NZ too) keep on talking about more growth and making the economy strong and boosting production. More mining, more coal production, find some new oil reserves, develop the Canadian or the Venezuelan tar sands for oil production. These are the very things that are killing the planet.

Don't worry Lamar. World government is not coming.

What's coming is a failure of government on a world scale, economic decline like you never imagined, population die-off in many poor countries, and falling populations even in the rich countries. I suspect compounded by war over water, oil and other resources. War which will help destroy the participants on both sides.

I'm an optimist because I have to be. I believe the problems of the world CAN be solved. But the institutions of the world change too slowly, our old minds won't let us learn the lessons we need to learn. We refuse to see that WE OURSELVES are the problem.

I expect Lamar that you will live to wish that "world government" was possible. Instead we'll squabble and fight and try to play the silly game of top dog, while the world burns around us.

You want a LIVING example of what we have done and will do again, look at the pathetic effort to control fishing in the world's oceans. Every nation shares the blame, and all over the world fishermen are subsidised by governments to go out and catch MORE fish, and politicians accept "donations" to make sure that proper regulation (World Government?) of fishing is impossible. That's they way we do "business".

.Amidst his words and his actions, tangled up in financial considerations, Lord Monckton sends quite a mixed message, and I prefer to leave him to sort that out, as I will have to leave it to the observer, whether serious or casual, to gauge Barack Obama's progress as executive answerable to the globalist agenda as he is.

To say "since Kyoto it's been the USA in particular taking a free ride" is something with which I will not argue.

At the same time, China has become THE most monumental environmental catastrophe of all time.

It finally dawned on me that China's reason for controlling Tibet is so simple it escapes all those who prefer to overintellectualize whatever comes their way: within Tibet are the sources of the Yellow, the Yangtze, and the Mekong Rivers.

China's population (if I remember the numbers correctly) represents about one-fifth (20%) of humanity and is dependent on only seven (7) percent of the world's water (if Tibet is controlled by China).

The Yellow River is now so polluted that for two thirds of its 3400-mile length its water is unfit for human consumption, and for at least a quarter of its run, the water is not even good enough for agricultural use; worse, during most of the '90s, the Yellow ran out of water before it reached the sea, and now, even the source of the Yellow is drying up.

The cause of headwater depletion is said to be glacial melting, due to global warming, even though global temperatures, overall, have been falling now for a number of years.

China's industrial growth (the equivalent of $50 billion was invested toward new coal and chemical plants along the Yellow mid-river in 2008 alone) will come to a grinding halt for lack of water, while an aging Chinese population will be dependent on one child to provide for two parents and four grandparents while they are still alive, even on "factory wages" - assuming the one child does not perish in a so-called "cancer village" of which there are an increasing number the farther down river one finds employment, having been driven off the fertile farming land either by construction of factories and housing, or by lack of water.

So the U. S. is not alone it its "overconsumption" of all things environmental which God provided to sustain life - all life, not just human life - on this planet.

Of course none of this even begins to consider what is happening with the Sun (finally, a new sun spot after many months without one), and other "galactic" considerations, all of which are part of the formula which determines the temperature of any body travelling through space.

Still, anyone who piles trash on his own doorstep cannot expect rose-coloured glasses and air freshener to make up for the lack of health and happiness which result from such neglect.

"While the bankers were busy carving up the world at the G20 Summit, Barack Obama was in New York City, at the United Nations, because he's got a new job - to chair the United Nations Security Council, the most powerful position in the world government body....Barack Obama is the first president to hold two posts simultaneously, and there's a good reason for that: It's illegal. Article 1, Section 9, of the Constitution forbids any U. S. President from serving any foreign government or institution. He swears an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States ... but now Barack Obama has sworn allegiance to the global government and the United Nations that he heads up.

Let that sink in real good. Barack Obama now heads the United Nations Security Council. You cannot serve two masters, and Obama isn't. ..."

> At the same time, China has become THE most monumental environmental catastrophe of all time.

It finally dawned on me that China's reason for controlling Tibet is so simple it escapes all those who prefer to overintellectualize whatever comes their way: within Tibet are the sources of the Yellow, the Yangtze, and the Mekong Rivers.

China's population (if I remember the numbers correctly) represents about one-fifth (20%) of humanity and is dependent on only seven (7) percent of the world's water (if Tibet is controlled by China).

James:

I think you are really on to something, which the utopian political navel gazers do not have a clue about.

Some of the most productive agricultural land in the world is California's central valley. It is the food basket of America.

Unfortunately, it is a semi-arid region and the agricultural bonanza requires irrigation and lots and lots of water.

In the past, the federal government built great dams and canals to supply that water. But the era of radical environmentalism has brought that to a halt, and in fact politicians are actually advocating the destruction of existing dams.

As a result, California is only utilizing probably ten or twenty percent of it's agricultural potential. Most of the central valley is dry, unirrigated sparse pasture lane.

California is also very rich in oil and gas potential. The coastal shelf of California has been proven to have vast potential. This potential has also been put off limits by radical environmentalists.

A friend of mine is a Taiwanese entrepreneur and businessman. He has given me a very astute insight into China's cultual and world view.

China has enormous reserves of U.S. currency, over a trillion dollars. China is a very ancient and self-centered civilization. The Chinese word for "foreigner" is the same as the word for "barbarian". China has billion people to feed. China understands and has been employing agricultural irrigation for thousands of years.

The Chinese mentality is to save what it has and use other peoples resources.

Chinese investors have been investing significant amounts of their wealth in the western U.S. and Canada, particularly in California land and real estate. The Chinese business community is also very powerful in places like Vancouver, Canada.

From the perspective of Chinese leaders, California and Canada are just provincial, third world backwaters run by corrupt, local capitalist plutcrats.

The potential wealth of California is ripe for the plucking.

It would simply take an act of will and conscious decision for China to employ is vast wealth and influence to gain economic control of California and Canada, brush aside all the environmeltist concerns of pampered trust fund children at the Sierra Club, build vast irrigation projects from Canada and the Sierra Nevada, and turn California into an engine of agricultural productivity and wealth not seen seen the era of Babylon and the Egyptian Nile culture.

And California's vast oil wealth could become China energy colony for hundreds of years, and make China energy self-sufficient.

Americans are blind and stupid, and China is holding just about all the high cards.

Are you telling me that China has the financial clout to restore California from an agricultural perspective better than anyone else - including our own citizenry? Are you saying the reason China would want to do this is not so much to help the United States, but China itself?

Maybe I have this all wrong, but I think you are saying that China wants to make both California and Canada a bread basket for itself. If so, how does that work?

> Are you telling me that China has the financial clout to restore California from an agricultural perspective better than anyone else - including our own citizenry? Are you saying the reason China would want to do this is not so much to help the United States, but China itself?

Lamar:

Please keep in mind that what I am saying about China is almost entirely my own speculation.

As military strategists do, I was attempting to look at both China's capabilities, and China's intentions.

This was a THOUGHT experiment.

I see that China has the CAPABILITIES to make huge investments in California and the western United States and Canada.

I see that it is possible to conjure up a very plausible rationale for why China would want to invest in the United States, and the benefits to China for doing so.

I have ZERO knowledge of what China's intentions are. We can only look at history and try to discern some plausible analogies, and psychoanalyze the possible mental processes of China's leaders. This is all very risky and error prone.

My marketing professor in MBA school made a very wise observation: "the behavior of the market is rational, but not necessarily logical".

What he meant was that it is very difficult to predict before the fact what an actor will do in the market place on the basis of pure logical analysis. On the other hand, after you have seen what the actor has done, it is usually possible to conclude that the actor has acted rationally according to some set of rational premises. It was just hard to know in advance what those premises would be.

I hope I didn't alarm you too much. My intent was to offer up some food for thought and see if anyone else might to able to affirm or dispute my premises.

Well Thomas and Lamar, we have a possible solution to the problem of California's debt. Actually Lamar can claim that he thought of it first. There are several letters on Ryze asking for investment in California.

I also suggested last January or February, that Americans might do well to brush up on their Mandarin skills.

The Chinese are very worried about the huge stash of US$ denominated paper they are holding, and the decline in the value of the US Dollar. (Present and future)

Although the World Trade Organisation has a rule that capital is able to flow freely between states and there is not supposed to be any restriction on overseas buyers purchasing businesses or land or public utilities, the fact is that there are severe restrictions on what foreigners can buy in the USA.

I expect those restrictions will be relaxed in the coming years, and Thomas's idea may not be too far from what happens. (Do you find that scary Lamar?)

Fear not. A good chunk of NZ was sold off 25-30 years ago. Mostly the new overseas owners were one trick ponies, they came, they implemented their one trick, but overall they mismanaged the business. They ended up running at a loss and NZ interests managed to buy it back.

Lamar: Many of these assets were once state run. They were government businesses. Over a 3-4 year period almost everything that could be separated out as a business unit was given a board of directors and independent managers. After a couple of years these business units were offered on the open market. We were told, as you keep stating, Lamar, that government can't run anything.

Well that's not true. The private owners ran these firms in a different way, they had different incentives. But often the result was not much different than what we had before, and occasionally the result was much worse. All I'm saying here is that there is no magic. It's intellectually lazy to assume that any state run business is necessarily a disaster. That's simply not valid.

The problem is that if the government is seen to be a limitless source of capital, and willing to subsidise the business, it become impossible to exercise proper control, and also impossible to kill the out of control entity. That is something to worry about.

> The problem is that if the government is seen to be a limitless source of capital, and willing to subsidise the business, it become impossible to exercise proper control, and also impossible to kill the out of control entity. That is something to worry about.

EXACTLY!

Privately owned businesses operate, ideally, under the discipline of "profit and loss".

If a business cannot find the formula to profitability based on fulfilling customer needs and controlling costs, then the grim reaper of bankruptcy puts the business out of its misery and gives other entrepreneurs an opportunity to succeed.

Government run businesses inevitably become zombies. Even if they loose the ability to satisfy needs effectively and control costs, politicians will keep them alive with transfusions of taxpayer money.

A year or so ago, American taxpayers learned that there were businesses that were, supposedly, "too big to fail". This was deemed by politicians to be justification for transfusions of tax money and creating our own All American business zombies.

Based on the polls and the most recent special election outcomes, it looks like voters are developing a healthy skepticism about businesses "too big to fail", and the witch doctors who create them.

I am going to play Devil's advocate here. A world government is unavoidable.

Cast your mind back to the early days of US and Canada.

Territories were staked out, each area had it's own laws, enforcement, and even money.

As things progressed it was "better" to join forces in order to stop those who wished to oppress/enslave and to work more efficiently.

As populations grew, as communications got faster, communities joined forces to become towns and states (provinces), then united to form (strong) groups.

Now we are faced with many separate such groups we call countries. Many are at war because of differences in the standards of life. Many just want to use their strength to become "better" and "bigger". It is the way of things.

The universe started off with nothing and evolved into what we now see. Life started as a bunch of single cells fighting for space and evolved into complex organisms.

Everything evolves or it dies.. Nothing stays static.

Now that we have instantaneous world communications and information sharing via the internet we are poised to further evolve into an even larger amalgamation of component parts, the "World Government".

Eased by fast communications and driven by multinational corporations, a joining of like minded countries will evolve.

Anyone watch Star Wars, Star Trek or Total Recall 2050? Sci Fi can be a true indicator of the future.

Your Devil's Advocate covers a lot of territory to make a point. You even transcend time and space. One minute we are talking about the early days of Canada and the USA. This somehow morphs into the origin of the universe and where do we end up? We end up talking about science fiction and saying how much it is like real life. What does that mean? Does that mean we can learn valuable lessons from what never even took place?

Before world government happens on this planet, my hope is that I am either dead or raptured off this Big Blue Marble.

> As things progressed it was "better" to join forces in order to stop those who wished to oppress/enslave and to work more efficiently.

> As populations grew, as communications got faster, communities joined forces to become towns and states (provinces), then united to form (strong) groups.

An interesting thesis, but my instinct is that the opposite will likely happen.

I think the lesson of human history is that there are two opposite tendencies at work:

A. ) the tendency of groups, or tribes, or nations to get larger, have more land, more slaves, and more power.

B. ) to concentrate wealth, resources, power in the hands of ever smaller and smaller elites.

The first tendency is what gives rise to great empires, like Alexander the Great, The Roman Empire, The Ottoman Empire, etc. There seems to be an inexorable principle of scale among human organizations that says the larger an organization gets, the more ungovernable it becomes. When an organization becomes ungovernable, it deteriorates and falls apart. It is the inevitable fate of empires.

The second tendency is what gives rise to, among other things, labor unions. Labor unions prosper by EXCLUDING competing laborers from the work force. There is no point in having a labor union if you let everybody in. The ideal labor union organizes ten percent of the work force to command fifty percent of the wages.

I recall a situation a number of years back where the regional transportation authority for the Bay Area was trying to negotiate a blanket labor agreement involving ten or twelve different unions. One very small union of very specialized technocrats made insanely outrageous demands. They were, or course, supported by the other eleven unions who would refuse to cross their picket lines. So a very small group enriched itelf immensely by excluding and controlling the larger community.

I realize that there are lots of utopian dreamers who fantasize about a unified world government of some sort that will usher in a golden era of harmony and cooperation. But I am very skeptical. There is and always will be a segmant of humanity infected with solipsism and megalomania, and this segment will always compete to be the Pharoah. It's in mankinds's DNA.

I think George Orwell's scenario in "1984" is about right. There will probably always be three or more "empires" trying to play other empires against each other in order to become the top empire. And empires will always find it in their interest to make sure that no other empire succeeds.

What does it mean for humanity to be infected with solipsism and megalomania? You lost me with those big words.

I think I know how you feel about labor unions, but I am not sure about that, either. Would it be fair to say that you see labor unions as being a detriment to our economy and way of life? If what you are saying is just a little bit valid, that "the ideal labor union organizes ten percent of the work force to command fifty percent of the wages," then labor unions are a real drag on our economy - as opposed to an asset.

> What does it mean for humanity to be infected with solipsism and megalomania? You lost me with those big words.

Excellent question.

I have spent a great deal of my adult life trying to unravel the really, really fundamental issues that distinguish between "the left" and "the right".

It's always been remarkable that almost all leftists tend to believe in the same set of issues (unions, welfare, environmentalism, big government, etc, etc.) and all "rightists" tend to believe in THEIR set of issues (property rights, gun rights, self-reliance, personal responsibility, etc., etc.).

What explains this?

I think the difference goes back at least as far as the ancient Greek philosphers. The underlying issue is virtually the same issue that Socrates was debating with the Sophists, which included among others the philospher Gorgias.

In a nutshell, Socrates believed their was some ulimate "truth" and "virtue" which he sought to discover through dialogue and asking questions. Implicitly, Socrates believed in an external objective reality.

The Sophists believed, essentially, that people were only able to know "reality" from what their senses told them. As a practical matter, if a person didn't learn anything through their senses, it didn't exist for that person.

Hence, different people had different "realities", and their was no common "external objective reality".

Solipsism comes from the latin words "sole ipsum", which means "only oneself". It refers to the belief or perception that a person is the only intelligent being in the universe, and everyone and everything else are just perceptions.

A corollary to the denial of external objective reality is "nihilism", or the belief in nothingness, beyond the self. The nihilist believes that after he is dead and gone, there is . . . nothing.

What contemporary leftists believe, in my opinion, has a philosophical pedigree that goes all the way back to the Sophists and their "nihilism".

Throughout history, succeeding generations of philosphers have built on the sophist's ideas of nihilism and embellished them and refined them in various ways.

Rene Descartes famously said: "I think, therefore I am".

Conversely, if Descartes is NOT thinking, i.e. dead, he is no more, and there is no external objective reality.

Nietszche, Hegel, Engles, Marx and others have all expressed ideas that can be characterized as "nihilist".

The logical extension of "nihilism" is "narcissism", obsessive love and admiration of the self, based on the belief that the self is the only intelligent being that exists. And from "narcissism" it is only a short step to "megalomania": the belief that oneself is the greatest, smartest being in existence AND is entitled to absolute authority and control over all other beings. If one believes that other beings are just cartoon images projected by your senses onto the inside of your skull, than you can manipulate those images anyway you want for your own benefit and pleasure. There is no such thing as "morality".

The philosphy of Socrates goes down an entirely different path. There IS and external objective reality. It IS populated with independent beings that have a separate existence. The external independent beings have FREE WILL. And in a world with external independent beings having free will, the formula for harmonious world really boils down to: The Golden Rule.

"Do Unto Others as You Would Have them do unto you"

And if you think about it, the Golden Rule is the underlying ethic of the market system and of capitalism, which assumes that people have free will and can independently make decisions on economic transactions that improve their satisfaction and well being.

Long winded, but not easy to say concisely since people have so many wrong headed notions in their skulls.

Socialism is Marxist. Marxism is narcisstic. And, narcissm runs counter to the concept of the ethics of reciprocity (better-known as The Golden Rule). Yet, what we keep seeing all the time through Web 2.0 innovation online is that this idea of lifting up a society of people makes life on this Big Blue Marble for those who participate better.

Why do people travel in the direction that is of the least benefit to them? Why is my country willingly bankrupting itself and mortgaging the lives of future generations that are yet to be born? Where is there danger in seeing that human life has value right from conception? If people are living longer, it means more accommodations need to be made to care for them involving more people. But, we don't have more people. We have less...and we actually designed for that outcome by pushing such commercial baby-killing operations as Planned Parenthood.

Is there anything that can be done to educate the progressive liberals who are apparently so misguided that they would willingly attempt to save a species of fish and at the same time deny dry land in California water. What has happened to the world's sense of sanity? Did it never have it?

> Is there anything that can be done to educate the progressive liberals who are apparently so misguided that they would willingly attempt to save a species of fish and at the same time deny dry land in California water.

This was the core question that I set out to answer when I tried to understand the different realities of "the left" and "the right" (or the Sophists and the Socrateseans).

My conclusion is that "progressive liberals" will likely never change because they live in a closed reality inside of their heads.

Their philosophy results in their psychology, and their psychology is narcissism.

Everyone has some degree of self awareness, but extreme narcissism is formally recognized as a psychiatric pathology known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

There are two very troubling of aspects of Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

1. It can be induced in people, typically by difficult childhood environments or experiences like parental abandonment, divorce, alcoholism, etc.

2. It is virtually incurable. There is no reliable way known to recover a pathological narcissist once they go over the edge. Once a narcissist, always a narcissist.

The narcissistic reality built into the heads of people with NPD essentially makes them uneducable. They perceive that they are "the smartest person in the room", and therefore, no one is going to tell them anything IMPORTANT that they don't already know or need to know.

The way that narcissism works is that narcissistic people need a source of what is called "narcissistic supply". In other words, they need to surround themselves with people who will continually remind them of how wonderful they are. People who decline to be enablers or sycophants for narcissists inevitably find themselves ignored or excluded.

People who actively seek to diminish or undermine the narcissist's grandiose self-image often find themselves the objects of active hostility from the narcissist.

The modern liberal culture supports and reinforces the society wide tendency to greater and greater narcissism. Think of "self-esteem" programs in the schools. Think of "American Idol". Think of Oprah and her daily parade of pathetic, blubbering victims. Me! Me! Me! It's all about me.

Sadly, we live in culture of narcissism. "Progressive liberalism" is a political ideology that panders to, fosters and exploits narcissism.